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HE HIGHER 
SACRIFICE 



DAVID STARR JORDAN 

PRESIDENT OF ^' 
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1908 





!..mRA5?Y ai CONGRESS 

AUG [ 21 J908 
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COPt A. 






Copyright, igo8 
By the American Unitarian Association 



2^/^^ Heintzemann Press, Boston, Mass., U.S. A, 







|ISDOM too great to be 
translated into action is 
a contradiction of words. 
For wisdom is only knowing what 
one ought to do next. Virtue is 
doing it. Virtue and enjoyment 
have never been far apart from each 
other. To know and to do is the 
basis of the highest service. Those 
the world has the right to honor 
are those who have found enough 
to do. The fields are always white 
to their harvest. 









THE HIGHER SACRIFICE. 

I ACH man that lives is, 
in part, a slave, because 
he is a living being. 
This belongs to the 
definition of life itself. Each crea- 
ture must bend its back to the lash 
of its environment. We imagine life 
without conditions — life free from 
the pressure of insensate things out- 
side us or within. But such life is the 
dream of the philosopher. We have 
never known it. The records of the 
life we know are full of concessions 
to such pressure. 

The vegetative part of life, that 





THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




part which finds its expression in 
physical growth, and sustenance, 
and death, must always be slavery. 
The old primal hunger of the pro- 
toplasm rules over it all. Each of 
the myriad cells or centres of energy 
of which man is made must be fed 
and cared for. The perennial hunger 
of these cells he must stifle. This 
hunger began when life began. It 
will cease only when life ceases. It 
will last till the water of the sea is 
drained, the great lights are put out, 
and the useless earth is hungup empty 
in the archives of the universe. 
This old hunger the individual 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

man must each day meet and satisfy. 
He must do this for himself; else, 
in the long run, it will not be done. 
If others help feed him, he must feed 
others in return. This return is not 
charity nor sacrifice ; it is simply ex- 
change of work. It is the division of 
labor in servitude. Directly or indi- 
rectly, each must pay his debt of life. 
There are a few, as the world goes, 
who in luxury or pauperism have 
this debt paid for them by others. 
But there are not many of these fu- 
gitive slaves. The number will never 
be great ; for the lineage of idleness 
is never long nor strong. A student 







10 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




once asked an Australian professor 
why the judgments of the Lord 
were visited to the third and fourth 
generation — not to the seventh or 
eighth. This was his answer : ^' Be- 
cause there is no seventh or eighth 
generation in the lineage of evil. It 
never goes beyond the fourth/' It is 
only the strong, the clean, the wise 
which count in survival. 

When this debt of life is paid, 
the slave becomes the man. Nature 
counts as men only those who are 
free. Freedom springs from within. 
No outside power can give it. Board 
and lodging on the earth once paid, 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 11 

a man's resources are his own. These 
he can give or hold. By the fullness 
of these is he measured. All acqui- 
sitions of man, Emerson tells us/^ are 
victories of the good brain and brave 
heart ; the world belongs to the en- 
ergetic, belongs to the wise. It is in 
vain to make a paradise but for good 
men.*' 

In the ancient lore of the He- 
brews, so Rabbi Voorsanger tells us, 
it is written, '' Serve the Lord, not 
as slaves hoping for reward, but as 
gods who will take no reward.'' The 
meaning of the old saying is this : 
Only the gods can serve. 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

Those who have nothing have 
nothing to give. He who serves as a 
slave serves himself only. That he 
hopes for a reward shows that to him- 
self his service is really given. To 
serve the Lord, according to another 
old saying, is to help one's fellow- 
men. The Eternal asks not of mor- 
tals that they assist Him with His 
earth. The tough old world has been 
His for centuries of centuries before 
it came to be ours, and we can neither 
make it nor mar it. We were not con- 
sulted when its foundations were laid 
in the deep. The waves and the 
storms, the sunshine and the song of 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 13 

birds need not our aid. They will 
take care of themselves. Life is the 
only material that is plastic in our 
hand. Only man can be helped by 
man. 

When they hung John Brown in 
Virginia, many said, you remember, 
that in resisting the Government he 
had thrown away his life, and would 
gain nothing for it. He could not, as 
Thoreau said at the time, get a vote 
of thanks or a pair of boots for his 
life. ^^ He could not get four-and- 
sixpence a day for being hung, take 
the year around/' But he was not 
askingfora vote of thanks. It was not 







14 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




for the four-and-sixpence a day that 
he stood between brute force and its 
victims. It was to show men the na- 
ture of slavery. It was to help his 
fellow-citizens to read the story of 
their institutions in the light of his- 
tory. *^ You can get more/' Thoreau 
went on to say, *^ in your market (at 
Concord) for a quart of milk than 
you can for a quart of blood ; but 
yours is not the market heroes carry 
their blood to.'' The blood of heroes 
is not sold by the quart. The great, 
strong, noble, and pure of this world, 
those who have made our race worthy 
to be called men, have not been paid 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE ]5 

by the day or by the quart ; not by 
riches, nor fame, nor power, nor any- 
thing that man can give. Out of the 
fullness of their lives have they served 
the Lord. Out of the wealth of their 
resources have they helped their fel- 
lowmen. 

The great man cannot be a self- 
seeker. The greatness of a Napoleon 
or of an Alexander is the greatness 
of gluttony. It is slavery on a grand 
scale. What men have done for their 
own glory or aggrandizement has 
left no permanent impress. '' I have 
carried out nothing,'' says the war- 
rior, Sigurd Slembe. " I have not 






16 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 



sown the least grain nor laid one 
stone upon another to witness that 
I have lived/' Napoleon could have 
said as much, if, like Sigurd, he had 
stood *^upon his own grave and heard 
the great bell ring/' The tragedy of 
the Isle of St. Helena lay not in the 
failure of effort, the collapse of em- 
pire, but in the futility of the aim 
to which effort was directed. There 
was no tragedy of the Isle of Patmos. 
The scenes at Harper's Ferry will 
not be recorded in final history as 
tragedy. 

What such men as Napoleon have 
torn down remains torn down. All 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE IT 

this would soon have fallen of itself ; 
for that which has life in it cannot be 
destroyed by force. But what such 
men have built has fallen when their 
hands have ceased to hold it up. The 
names history cherishes are those of 
men of another type. Only ^^a man 
too simply great to scheme for his 
proper self ''is great enough to be- 
come a pillar of the ages. 

It is a part of the duty of higher 
education to build up ideals of noble 
freedom. It is not mainly for help in 
the vegetative work of life that you 
go to college. You are just as good 
a slave without it. You can earn your 







18 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




board and lodging without the for- 
mality of culture. The training of 
the college will make your power 
for action greater, no doubt; but it 
will also magnify your needs. The 
debt of life a scholar has to pay is 
greater than that paid by the clown. 
And the higher sacrifice the scholar 
may be called upon to make grows 
with the increased fullness of his life. 
Greater needs go with greater power, 
and both mean greater opportunity 
for sacrifice. 

In the days you have been with 
us you should have formed some 
ideals. You should have bound these 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 19 

ideals together with the chain of 
'^well-spent yesterdays/' the higher 
heredity which comes not from your 
ancestors, but which each man must 
build up for himself. You should 
have done something in the direc- 
tion of the life of higher sacrifice, 
the life that from the fullness of its 
resources can have something to 
give. 

Such sacrifice is not waste, but 
service; not spending, but accom- 
plishing. Many men, and more 
women, spend their lives for others 
when others would have been better 
served if they had spared themselves. 







20 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




Mere giving is not service. ^^ Char- 
ity that is irrational and impulsive 
giving, is a waste, whether of money 
or of life." ^^ Charity creates half the 
misery she relieves; she cannot re- 
lieve half the misery she creates.'' 

The men you meet as you leave 
these halls will not understand your 
ideals. They will not know that your 
life is not bound up in the present, 
but has something to ask or to give 
for the future. Till they understand 
you they will not yield you their 
sympathies. They may jeer at you 
because the whip they respond to 
leaves no mark upon you. They will 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 21 

try to buy you, because the Devil 
has always bid high for the lives of 
young men with ideals. A man in 
his market stands always above par. 
Slaves are his stock in trade. If a man 
of power can be had for base pur- 
poses, he can be sure of an imme- 
diate reward. You can sell your 
blood for its weight in milk, or for 
its weight in gold — whatever you 
choose, — if you are willing to put 
it up for sale. You can sell your will 
for the kingdoms of the earth ; and 
you will see, or seem to see, many 
of your associates making just such 
bargains. But in this be not deceived. 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

No young man worthy of anything 
else ever sold himself to the Devil. 
These are dummy sales. The Devil 
puts his own up at auction in hope of 
catching others. If you fall into his 
hands, you had not far to fall. You 
were already ripe for his clutches. 

When a man steps forth from the 
college, he is tested once for all. It 
takes but a year or two to prove his 
mettle. In the college high ideals 
prevail, and the intellectual life is 
taken as a matter of course. In the 
world outside it appears otherwise, 
though the conditions of success are 
in fact just the same. It is not true. 








THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 2S 

though it seems so, that the com- 
mon life is a game of ^^ grasping and 
griping, with a whine for mercy at 
the end of it/' It is your own fault 
if you find it so. It is not true that 
the whole of man is occupied with 
the effort " to live just asking but to 
live, to live just begging but to be/' 
The world of thought and the world 
of action are one in nature. In both 
truth and love are strength, and folly 
and selfishness are weakness. There 
is no confusion of right and wrong 
in the mind of the Fates. It is only 
in our poor bewildered slave intel- 
lects that evil passes for power. All 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

about US in the press of life are real 
men, *^ whose fame is not bought 
nor sold at the stroke of a politician's 
pen/' Such are the men in whose 
guidance the currents of history flow. 
The work of the world is not accom- 
plished anonymously. It is the work 
of living men, each true to the best 
light of his generation. The masses 
of men — " men with guano in their 
composition" — do not make his- 
tory. It goes on in spite of them. Its 
events pass over their heads. 

The lesson of values in life it 
should be yours to teach, because it 
should be yours to know and to act. 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 25 

Men are better than they seem, and 
the hidden virtues of life appear 
when men have learned how to trans- 
late them into action. Men grasp 
and hoard material things because in 
their poverty of soul they know of 
nothing else to do. It is lack of train- 
ing and lack of imagination, rather 
than total depravity, which gives our 
social life its sordid aspect. When a 
plant has learned the secret of flow- 
ers and fruit, it no longer goes on 
adding meaningless leaf on leaf. And 
as '' flowers are only colored leaves, 
fruits only ripe ones,'* so are the vir- 
tues only perfected and ripened 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

forms of those impulses which un- 
directed may show themselves as 
vices. 

It is your relation to the overflow 
of power that determines the man- 
ner of man you are. Slave or god, it 
is for you to choose. Slave or god, it 
is for you to will. It is for such choice 
that will is developed. Say what we 
may about the limitations of the life 
of man, they are largely self-limita- 
tions. Hemmed in is human life by 
the force of the Fates ; but the will 
of man is one of the Fates, and can 
take its place by the side of the 
rest of them. The man who can will 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 27 

is a factor in the universe. Only the 
man who can will can serve the 
Lord at all, and by the same token, 
hoping for no reward. 

Likewise is love a factor in the 
universe. Power is not strength of 
body or mind alone. One who is 
poor in all else may be rich in sym- 
pathy and responsiveness. ^* They 
also serve who only stand and wait.'' 

In the magazine, Tbe Dial, Mr. 
W. P. Reeves tells us the tale, half 
humorous, half allegorical, of the 
decadence of a scholar. According 
to this story, one Thomson was a 
college graduate, full of high notions 







28 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

of the significance of life and the 
duties and privileges of the scholar. 
With these ideals he went to Ger- 
many, that he might strengthen 
them and use them for the benefit 
of his fellow-men. He spent some 
years in Germany, filling his mind 
with all that German philosophy 
could give. Then he came home, to 
turn his philosophy into action. To 
do this, he sought a college profes- 
sorship. 

This he found it was not easy to 
secure. Nobody cared for him or his 
message. The authority of ^^wise 
and sober Germany*' was not recog- 








THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 29 

nized in the institutions of America, 
and he found that college professor- 
ships were no longer " plums to be 
picked" by whosoever should ask 
for them. The reverence the German 
professor commands is unknown in 
America. In Germany, the author- 
ity of the wise men is supreme. 
Their words, when they speak, are 
heard with reverence and attention. 
In America, wisdom is not wis- 
dom till the common man has ex- 
amined it and pronounced it to 
be such. The conclusions of the 
scholar are revised by the daily 
newspaper. The readers of these 






30 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

papers care little for messages from 
Utopia. 

No college opened its doors to 
Thomson, and he saw with dismay 
that the life before him was one of 
discomfort and insignificance, his 
ideals having no exchangeable value 
in luxuries or comforts. Meanwhile, 
Thomson's early associates seemed 
to get on somehow. The world 
wanted their cheap achievements 
though it did not care for him. 

Among the associates was one 
Wilcox, who became a politician, 
and, though small in abilities and 
poor in virtues, his influence among 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 31 



men seemed unbounded. The young 
woman who had felt an interest in 
Thomson's development, and to 
whom he had read his rejected verses 
and his uncalled-for philosophy, had 
joined herself to the Philistines, and 
yielded to their influence. She had 
become Wilcox's wife. His friends 
regarded Thomson's failure as a j oke. 
He must not take himself too seri- 
ously, they said. A man should be in 
touch with his times. " Even Philis- 
tia," one said, "has its aesthetic ritual 
and pageantry." A wise man will not 
despise this ritual, because Philistin- 
ism, after all, is the life of the world. 








32 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

But Thomson still held out. "I 
pledged my word in Germany/' he 
said, ''to teach nothing that I did 
not believe to be true. I must live up 
to this pledge.'' And so he sought 
for positions, and he failed to find 
them. Finally, he had a message 
from a friend that a professorship in 
a certain institution was vacant. 
This message said, " Cultivate Wil- 
cox.^' So, in despair, Thomson be- 
gan to cultivate Wilcox. He began to 
feel that Wilcox was a type of the 
world, a bad world, for which he 
was not responsible. The world's 
servant he must be, if he received his 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 33 



wages. When he secured the cov- 
eted appointment, through the po- 
litical pull of Wilcox and the mild 
kindness of Mrs. Wilcox, he was 
ready to teach whatever was wanted 
of him, whether it was truth in 
Germany or not. He found that 
he could change his notions of 
truth. The Wilcox idea was that 
everything in America is all right 
just as it is. To this he found it 
easy to respond. His salary helped 
him to do so. And at last, the rec- 
ord says, he became ''laudator tem- 
poris actiy one who praises the 
times that are. The times that are 







34 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




to be demand a higher, virile type 
of manliness. 

So runs the allegory. As a matter 
of fact the story is not true — for no 
university in America nor anywhere 
else asks a man to teach what is not 
true. The outside temptation to fall 
short of one's best is not great with 
the scholar. It is the impulse of 
weakness inside against which we 
must guard. When you pass from 
the world of thought you will find 
yourself in the world of action. The 
conditions are not changed, but they 
seem to be changed. How shall you 
respond to the seeming difference? 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 35 



Shall you give up the truth of high 
thinkingfor the appearance of speedy 
success ? If you do this, it will not be 
because you are worldly-wise, but 
because you do not know the world. 
In your ignorance of your own 
worth you may sell yourself cheaply. 
One must know life before he can 
know truth. He who will be a leader 
of men must first have the power to 
lead himself. The world is selfish 
and unsympathetic. But it is also 
sagacious. It rejects as worthless 
him who suffers decadence when he 
comes in contact with its vulgar 
cleverness. The natural man can 







36 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

look the world in the face. The true 
man will teach truth wherever he 
is, — not because he has pledged 
himself in Germany not to teach 
anything else, but because in teach- 
ing truth he is teaching himself. 
His life thus becomes genuine, and, 
sooner or later, the world will re- 
spond to genuineness in action. The 
world knows the value of genuine- 
ness, and it yields to that force wher- 
ever it is felt. " The world is all 
gates," says Emerson, "all oppor- 
tunities, strings of tension waiting to 
be struck/' 

Thus, in the decadence of Thorn- 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 37 

son, it was not the times nor the world 
nor America that was at fault ; it was 
Thomson himself. He had in him 
no life of his own. His character, 
like his microscope, " was made in 
Germany,'' and bore not his mark, 
but the stamp of the German factory. 
Truth was not made in Germany ; 
and to know or to teach truth there 
must be a life behind it. The deca- 
dence of Thomson was the appear- 
ance of the real Thomson from under 
the axioms and formulae his teachers 
had given him. 

Men do not fail because they 
are human. They are not human 








38 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

enough. Failure comes from lack of 
life. Only the man who has formed 
opinions of his own can have the 
courage of his convictions. Learning 
alone does not make a man strong. 
Strength in life will show itself in 
happiness, will show itself in sym- 
pathy, in sacrifice. ^^ Great men," 
says Emerson, '' feel that they are 
so by renouncing their selfishness 
and falling back on what is humane. 
They beat with the pulse and breathe 
with the lungs of nations." 

It is not enough to know truth ; 
one must know men. It is not 
enough to know men ; one must be 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

a man. Only he who can Hve truth 
can know it. Only he who can live 
truth can teach it. " He could talk 
men over," says Carlyle of Mira- 
beau, '' he could talk men over be- 
cause he could act men over. At 
bottom that was it.'' 

And at bottom this is the source 
of all power and service. Not what 
a man knows, or what he can say ; 
but what is he ? what can he do ? 
Not what he can do for his board 
and lodging, as the slave who is 
"hired for life''; but what can he 
do out of the fullness of his resources, 
the fullness of his helpfulness, the 







40 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 



fullness of himself? The work the 
world will not let die was never paid 
for — not in fame, not in money, not 
in power. 

We hear much to-day of the de- 
cadence of literature, and we heard 
more ten years ago, before the breath 
of '' the Strenuous Life blew away 
thefadof the Drooping Spirit/' But 
this decadence, whatever it may be, 
is not due to the decadence of man. 
It is not the effect of the nerve-strain 
of over-wrought generations born 
too late in the dusk of the ages. Its 
nature is this — that uncritical and 
untrained men have come into a 








THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 41 

heritage they have not earned. They 
will pay money to have their feeble 
fancy tickled. The decadence of lit- 
erature is the struggle of mounte- 
banks to catch the public eye. There 
is money in the preparation of the 
^^ endless dirges to decay/' else the 
^* sad-eyed fakirs'' would be busy 
with something else. Such as these 
have '' verily their reward." But 
these performances are not a man's 
work. They have no relation to lit- 
erature, or art, or human life. These 
are not in decadence because their 
imitations are sold on street-corners 
or tossed into our laps on railway 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

trains. As well say that gold is in its 
decadence because brass can be burn- 
ished to look like it ; or that the sun 
is in his dotage because we have filled 
our gardens with Chinese lanterns. 

" No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, 
My oldest force is good as new. 
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 

Gives back the bending heavens in dew." 

Real literature has never been 
paid for. It has never asked the gold 
nor the plaudits of the multitude. 
Job, and Hamlet, and Faust, and 
Lear, were never written to fill the 
pages of a Sunday newspaper. John 
Milton and John Bunyan were not 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 43 

publishers' hacks ; nor were John 
Hampden, John Bright, or Samuel 
Adams, or for that matter Abraham 
Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt, 
under pay as walking-delegates of 
reform. 

No man was hired to find out that 
the world was round, or that men 
and lower animals have a common 
origin, that living organisms fill the 
fading leaf, or that valleys are worn 
down by water, or that the stars are 
suns. No man was paid to burn at 
the stake or die on the cross that 
other men might be free to live. 
The sane, strong, brave, heroic souls 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

of all ages were the men who, in 
the natural order of things, have 
lived above all considerations of pay 
or glory. They have served not as 
slaves hoping for reward, but as gods 
who would take no reward. Men 
could not reward Shakespeare, or 
Darwin, or Newton, or Helmholtz 
for their services any more than we 
could pay the Lord for the use of 
His sunshine. From the same inex- 
haustible divine reservoir it all comes 
— the service of the great man and 
the sunshine of God. 

"Twice have I moulded an image, 
And thrice outstretched my hand ; 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

Made one of day and one of night, 
And one of the salt sea strand; 

One in a Judean manger, 
And one by Avon's stream ; 

One over against the mouths of Nile, 
And one in the Academe." 



And in such image are men made 
every day, not only in Bethlehem or 
in Stratford, not alone on the banks 
of the Nile or the Arno ; but on the 
Mississippi, or the Columbia, or the 
San Francisquito, it may be, as well. 
All over the earth, in this image, 
are the sane and the sound and the 
true. And when and where their 
lives are spent arise generations of 
others like them, men in the true 







46 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

order. Not alone men in the '' image 
of God/' but ^*gods in the likeness 
of men/' 

It is to the training of the genu- 
ine man that the universities of the 
world are devoted. They call for the 
higher sacrifice, the sacrifice of those 
who have powers not needed in the 
common struggle of life, and who 
have, therefore, something over and 
beyond this struggle to give to their 
fellows. Large or small, whatever 
the gift may be, the world needs 
it all, and to every good gift the 
world will respond a thousand-fold. 
Strength begets strength, and wis- 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

dom leads to wisdom. " There is al- 
ways room for the man of force, and 
he makes room for many/' It is the 
strong, wise, and good of the past 
who have made our lives possible. 
It is the great human men, the 
" men in the natural order,'' that 
have made it possible for " the plain, 
common men'' that make up civil- 
ization to live, rather than merely 
to vegetate. 

We hear those among us some- 
times who complain of the short- 
ness of life, the smallness of truth, 
the limited stage on which man is 
forced to act. But the men who thus 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

complain are not men who have 
filled this little stage with their ac- 
tion. The man who has learned to 
serve the Lord never complains that 
his Master does not give him enough 
to do. The man who helps his fel- 
low-men does not stand about with 
idle hands to find men worthy of 
his assistance. He who leads a 
worthy life never vexes himself with 
the question as to whether life is 
worth living. 

We know that all our powers are 
products of the needs and duties of 
our ancestors. Wisdom too great to 
be translated into action is a contra- 






(3 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 49 

diction of words. For wisdom is 
only knowing what one ought to do 
next. Virtue is doing it. Virtue and 
enjoyment have never been far apart 
from each other. To know and to 
do is the basis of the highest ser- 
vice. Those the world has the right 
to honor are those who have found 
enough to do. The fields are always 
white to their harvest. 

Alexander the Great had con- 
quered his neighbors in Greece and 
Asia Minor, the only world he 
knew. Then he sighed for more 
worlds to conquer. But other worlds 
he knew nothing of lay all about 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




him. The secrets of the rocks he had 
never suspected ; the mystery of hfe 
was no more to him than to a jackal. 
Steam, electricity, the growth of 
trees, the marvel of human con- 
sciousness, — all these were as noth- 
ing to him. The only conquest he 
knew, the subjection of men's bod- 
ies, went but a little way. All the 
men who in his lifetime had ever 
even heard of Alexander the Great 
could find encampment on the Palo 
Alto farm. The great world of men 
in his day was beyond his knowl- 
edge. The great actual Universe of 
God lay about him in majestic in- 






THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 

visibility. His world was a very small 
one, and of that he had seen but a 
little corner. 

For the need of more worlds to 
conquer is not a sign of strength. It 
is the stamp of ignorance. It indi- 
cates that nothing worth while is 
yet conquered. No Lincoln ever 
sighed for more nations to save ; no 
Luther for more churches to purify ; 
no Darwin that nature had not more 
hidden secrets which he might fol- 
low to their depths ; no Agassiz that 
the thoughts of God were all ex- 
hausted before he was born. 







52 



THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 




And now, a final word to you as 
scholars. Higher education means 
the higher sacrifice. That you are 
taught to know is simply that you 
may do. Knowing the truth signi- 
fies that you should do right. Know- 
ing and doing have value only as 
translatedintojusticeandlove. There 
is no man so strong as not to need 
your help. There is no man so weak 
that you cannot make him stronger. 
There is none so sick that you can- 
not bring him to '^the gate called 
Beautiful.'' There is no evil in the 
world that you cannot help turn to 
goodness. " We could lift up this 







THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 53 

land/' said Bjornson of Norway, 
" we could lift up this land, if we 
lifted as one/' 

Therefore lift, and lift as one. You 
are strong enough and wise enough. 
You shall seek strength and wisdom, 
that others through you maybe wiser 
and stronger. You shall seek your 
place to work as your basis for help- 
fulness. Others will make the place 
as good as you deserve. If your lives 
are sacrificed in helping men, it is 
to the market of the ages you carry 
your blood, not the milk-market of 
Concord town. The honest man will 
not " pledge himself in Germany to 






54 THE HIGHER SACRIFICE 



teach nothing which is not true/' 
Being true himself, he can teach 
nothing false. The more men of the 
true order there are in the world, 
the greater is the world's need of 
men. 

As you are men, so will your 
places in life be secure. Every pro- 
fession is calling you. Every walk 
of life is waiting for your effort. 
There will always be room for you, 
and each of you will make room for 
many. 






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